> 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc?
I’ve only seen this referred to as a strategic failure. You seem to be declaring otherwise. What’s the upside for Microsoft?
I'm not saying any of those decisions was necessarily good. They're just the kinds of things CEOs do. I personally think Microsoft dropped the ball spectacularly on this, from the perspective of the consumer, and objectively choice is less and the outcomes are worse, and gamers and game devs have suffered tremendously as a result. However Microsoft achieved their objective, which was to be able to say that games revenue gross margin went up.
I’ve only seen this referred to as a strategic failure. You seem to be declaring otherwise. What’s the upside for Microsoft?